Monday, 13 June 2016

BB76 - Tanky McTankFace

At fanfest CCP Fozzie proposed a potential new ship class. Lets call it the fleet commander's flagship for now. This is to try and prevent "FC Headshotting" where the opposing fleet knows who the FC is and alpha's them off the field leaving the rest of the fleet in confusion and disarray. Fozzie mentioned a ship with a great tank but no offensive abilities. Is this a good idea? Is FC head-shotting a legitimate tactic? If CCP do go down the route of a "flagship" how might this work? Also is a new ship the answer or is there another way of giving an FC the ability not to be assassinated 12 seconds into the fight without letting players exploit it?

CCP Fozzie is looking for feedback regarding a possible battleship sized hull with no significant offensive abilities (much like the current booster ships), but with a significant tank - which would allow an FC to operate without a cloaky scout alternate account to maintain visuals of the battlefield in fair safety, (ie. not cloaked safety), so would be able to target, move etc.

Lets review why the current fleet commanders use cloakies: In case of explosives!

Lets face it; you as a fleet commander would use a cloaky to maintain visual of the battlefield while safe. Even though you are not able to target ships, you are still able to view on-grid non-cloaked ships from the main overview and provide your mates with consistent coordinated target calling, right?

The reason this works well, is that as an FC you can provide fleet support in a combat able ship, and in that ship do provide some kind of bonuses to your fleet mates (ie. reps, boosts, ewar etc). You make enough ISK to have several accounts, and this is just one more use for your cloaky scout. Many of us have cloaky scouts for a reason.

It sounds like the ship balancing team are looking to review the ship classes based on the actual usage of the booster ships. The first team originally designed these with the intent of FC'ing in mind. How they turned out to be used ended up being quite different though. The development team would like to rekindle this ship class with the original intent in mind. Im not saying this because I have some sleezy inside info. I'm saying this because I know how developers think.

We have a fully developed resource which took time and money to develop. So my best bet would be that they are going to base it on that platform. Adding new art work cost additional resources. No need, as they are busy with new Citadels. Bad business decisions are bad.

Throw something new into the mix. Supertank modules, only fittable on Command cruisers, which disallows offensive abilities is what they have in mind. But this won't "Fix" what they are trying to solve. The reason FC's has two accounts is that they need two ships. One for visual overview in case of ... yeah. Untimely explosions, and one for fleet support.

While I've never been the guy to go for, for suggestions on fixes - what I can say is that this will propably have some short term benefit for different aspects of the fleet to work.

Like a bonus for remote repping, DPS and ewar. Or a module that allows 2 characters online at one time to pilot a carrier? Or here's an idea; How about asking the CSM? They are in a unique position to provide feedback from their peers.

They would propably tell you that if a fleet has superior intel, they should stand a good chance at winning. If they can Alpha significant players off the field, shouldn't they be able to?